a kick under the ass every 5 or 10 minutes.
Gladly the attention to keep torrents alive. It seems that Tribler taking not enough action to keep torrends alive.
When a download stop than there are two options
1 Stop the torrent download and click on Force start to restart, this have sometime effect.
2 Restart Tribler. This have most positive effect the torrents come to alive again.
There are no problems with good seeded torrents. Torrents with 1,2,3 seeds stops very quickly.
My suggestion is to improve Tribler at this point.
UPDATE 13-07 continued comment.
If there is no activities in the speed field than restart the torrent.